Your website speed dramatically impacts your overall digital marketing efforts from SEO to conversion. A slow website is destined to fail. If you operate in a competitive environment where user experience decides everything, you can’t let a slow business website lose your hard-earned traffic.
The longer your site takes to load, the more dissatisfied your visitors will be. While Google makes page speed an important ranking factor, business owners now realize the devastating impact of a slow site on their ROI. This blog post will help you understand how page speed impacts your Google rankings and what you can do to improve it.
What is Page Speed?
“Page speed” and “site speed” are two different terms that people often use interchangeably. Page speed is the time a webpage takes to load its content. Google Page Insights is a recommended tool to analyze your web pages in terms of speed. The speed Index is a key indicator that tells how fast your webpages are. It refers to the average time at which visible parts of a page are displayed.
Every second counts when it comes to page speed. Needless to say that your average user has no patience for a page that takes too long to load. If your web pages load in less than a second, you don’t have to do anything. However, your pages still need improvements if they load in 2-3 seconds. Anything above 4 seconds is a red flag and requires immediate attention. A one-second delay in page speed can decrease your conversion rate to 7%.
If your website isn’t fast enough to deliver a good user experience, it’s time to resolve the issue and improve your Google rankings. Here are some useful tips to speed up your site and make it more user and search-friendly:
2. Optimize Images
Images are an integral part of any modern website. With the growing need for visual content, you can’t build a converting site without high-quality, relevant images. Images make it easier for you to convey emotions and add life to your text. However, it’s never an ideal situation when large images make your site slow. You can use various tools to optimize the size of your images without affecting their quality. First of all, you have to use the right format, and then compress your images with a compression tool. Optimizing your images the right way will lead to faster loading pages and better SEO results. Adobe Photoshop is a popular tool that you can use to optimize your visual content.
3. Enable Gzip compression
Gzip compression is a helpful technique used to reduce the size of various web page files and speed up website load time. If you want to achieve fast load times on your WordPress website, reducing the size of your pages is an unavoidable step. Enabling Gzip compression is an effective way to optimize your pages and eventually reduce the amount of time a user spends to download your web data.
HTML and CSS files often contain plenty of repeated text and whitespace that can significantly increase the speed of your pages. You can use Gzip compression to reduce the size of your pages by up to 70%
4. Leverage Browser Caching
Browser caching stores webpage resource files on a local computer when someone visits your webpage. When someone visits one of your web pages, the browser has to load several elements on your page: CSS files, logo, and other resources. When you take advantage of browser caching, it improves the page load time for your repeat visitors. However, setting the parameters for too long will make it difficult for your repeat visitors to see the updated version of your site.
5. Minify CSS, JavaScript, and HTML
Minification is a process which involves removing unnecessary data without affecting the way a browser processes your webpages. Minifying HTML, CSS, and JavaScript is a good technique to optimize your web pages for speed. HTMLMinifier and Closure Compiler are two recommended tools to minify your web resources.
Conclusion
From optimizing your images to minifying web resources, you can work your way through these techniques. Taking into account the massive impact of page speed on your Google rankings and conversion rate, you must take important steps to make your business website more efficient and fast.
About Reach First
As a full service digital marketing agency in Canada, we specialize in web development and building fast and converting websites for our clients. We have what it takes to build a sound online presence for your company. Feel free to schedule a free consultation to discuss your web development and digital marketing needs!